“He could have laundered the money by waiting tables or tending her or working in the library. Part time. Instead of that, he had a full time, job at Fountain of Youth. There’s also the evidence of what he didn’t have. No seventy-five dollar designer jeans. No hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar Timberland boots. Just good old Levi’s and Stride Rites.”
“Let me try one more thing,” Gregor said. “Let me try the possibility that he was just one very smart young man. Smart enough to know how to hide. Smart enough to know he had to bank his money because dealing drugs gets old fast and drug dealers don’t stay alive if they try to stay too long in the business.”
“No,” Philip Brye said. “If Tim was the kind of smart that that kind of behavior would have made him, then he was the greatest actor since Laurence Olivier. He might have played a game like that and gotten away with it if he were the sort of kid nobody notices, but he wasn’t. He was the sort of kid people like me tend to mentally adopt. Here’s a good kid, we say. From a modest background. Really determined to make his way up. Let’s give the kid a hand, we say. Let’s at least take an interest in how he’s doing. I think that’s what happened at Fountain of Youth, don’t you? They have some of their staff living in the house, but they don’t have all of it. I think Tim got asked because he was—affecting.”
“Possibly,” Gregor said.
Actually, the secret ingredient in the lives of most successful psychopaths was precisely the fact that they were—affecting. Charming. Bashful. Boyish. Eager. Vulnerable. All on the surface, but all perfectly plausible. People want to believe in the struggling young man determined to make good. There were even some struggling young men out there worth believing in.
Most of the struggling young men Gregor had known, however—especially the boyish, affecting, vulnerable kind—had been struggling mostly to hide their rage. On the evidence of what was in this file folder, Tim Bradbury had had a lot to be legitimately enraged about. It bothered Gregor that nobody had ever picked up any such emotion in him.
Gregor leafed through a few more pages of the folder. Most of its bulk was made up of repetitions. Three pictures of the house. Four pictures of what looked like Tim Bradbury as a ten-year-old boy. Two copies of Tim Bradbury’s page from the high school yearbook. Most of it would turn out not to mean anything.
Even so, Gregor thought, this was more than he had had when he got up this morning—a lot more. It was enough for him to move on with. It was a start.
Gregor hadn’t realized it before this, but he had been desperately looking for a start ever since that piece of balcony rail had gone crashing to Fountain of Youth’s polished hardwood foyer floor.
SIX
1
FOR NICK BANNERMAN, THE idea of leaving Fountain of Youth for an hour in the afternoon to have lunch or go to the Co-op was appalling. Ever since the incident at the SuperHour Grocery, Nick had developed an odd kind of situation-specific agoraphobia. He had been at Yale for four years. There were still restaurants he knew and where he was known, stores whose owners he knew by sight and others whose owners he knew by name. There was also the strip out on Dixwell Avenue: the chain stores and the franchises, the malls whose managements had New York legal help and knew too much about liability and law suits to pull anything like what he’d been subjected to at the SuperHour. Not that that would necessarily do him any good. There was a black judge in Pennsylvania suing Bloomingdale’s right now, because they’d had him arrested on suspicion of credit card fraud. Somebody in their security department had apparently decided that fraud was the only possible reason a black man could have a credit card. There were other things like that floating around in the air, too, in New York and Baltimore and Miami and San Francisco and Washington. Once Nick started thinking about it, he was shocked at how many incidents he could come up with. Incidents. It felt like the wrong word. An incident was the time you drank too much at dinner with your girlfriend’s mother and threw up on your shoes, or the time you stopped paying attention in the K mart parking lot and dented your fender on a lamp pole. It wasn’t this… creeping slime, that hid in the shadows and got you when you weren’t looking. That was what frightened him. It was out there waiting for him. It would get him if he didn’t watch out. He felt exactly the way he had when he was six years old and had first had to sleep in his bedroom in the new house in Larchmont, the one where the closet door would never entirely close.
The problem with me, Nick told himself, as he came out of his third dance of the morning—the intermediates, meaning he’d actually had to work up a little sweat—is that I’ve led a much too sheltered life. He wended his way through the women dressed in leotards in the corridor and headed for the stairway. He had grown up in Larchmont, not in Harlem. His father had been the first black man ever promoted into a vice presidency at IBM. He knew as little about the ghetto as any sorority president cheerleader at the University of Kansas. The only time he had ever seen a gun, except on a cop, was when he’d been mugged. Until the SuperHour, of course. The SuperHour had changed everything. Except that it probably hadn’t changed anything at all. He’d been followed by store detectives, ignored by sales clerks, dismissed by bank tellers. He’d had teachers, even at prep school and Yale, who had behaved as if his vocabulary were restricted to words of one syllable. There had been a thousand and one little things and a hundred and one not so little ones, but nothing, ever, anywhere, anything like what had happened at the SuperHour.